It was 2002 when Shara and I had the opportunity to travel to Russia to spend an entire summer working with a Jewish non-profit that trained Jewish teachers in Jewish day schools around the former Soviet Union about Judaism.
During the eight weeks that we were there, Shara and I worked directly with English teachers at these day schools. We spent hours with nine incredible Jewish women teaching them about Judaism–these women were all coming to terms with their own Jewish identities following years of Soviet rule.
They sought to understand what it meant to be Jewish – they were thirsting for knowledge and full of this incredible excitement to learn more about their identities. The following is a staged photo from a session in which we pretended they were bored and decided to retaliate against me. We had a lot of fun with them.
One of these women was named Rita. Rita was from the former Soviet republic of Georgia and now lived with her family in Moscow. We became close with Rita’s entire family including her husband and her two daughters. They introduced us to Georgian cuisine including Khachapuri, a sinful combination of cheese, bread and eggs that we fell in love with and also Georgian cheese and sweet Georgian wine.
On one evening during that trip, as we were having dinner at her home, Rita spoke to us about how her family in Georgia growing up had hidden their Jewishness, fearing Soviet persecution. She explained that there was only one holiday a year in which she was allowed to publicly celebrate her Jewish identity. This was a holiday in which her family
took major risks, but a day that was considered so important and so holy that those risks were worth it.
As she was speaking, we assumed that Rita was talking about Yom Kippur or Rosh Ha-Shanah, but as she described the rituals of the day, it became clear that she was talking about Simchat Torah. For Rita, Simchat Torah was magical – a day of pure joy, the one day of the year in which being Jewish was celebrated. Rita told us how she waited every year for Simchat Torah to arrive – in many ways, it was Simchat Torah that kept her Judaism alive.
It turns out Rita’s story is common for many Jews who grew up in the Soviet Union. For Soviet Jews, Simchat Torah was the one day of the year when you would go out into the streets and celebrate Judaism publicly.
In 1966, a young and still relatively unknown Eli Wiesel wrote about these celebrations in a book about Soviet Jewry. In describing the scene of a Soviet Simchat Torah celebration, Wiesel wrote, “The street was unrecognizable. For a second I thought I had been transported to another world, somewhere in Israel or in Brooklyn.”
What was it about Simchat Torah that allowed it to become such a holiday in Soviet Russia?
Simchat Torah is the celebration of the reading of the Torah – it is a day in which we conclude our annual cycle of reading and then beginning reading all over again.
We are a people of Torah, of its words and its sentences and its paragraphs –we are a people of this book which tells a story that has been read and commented on and wondered about and questioned and critiqued for generations – the Torah has moved with us as we have traveled, it has nourished us as we have faced persecution and trauma.
The great Chasidic mystic, the Baal Shem Tov explained that the Jewish people together compile the Torah – that each one of us is like a single letter in the scroll, that our families are words, that our communities are sentences and our people, at any given time, are paragraphs.
Thus, on Simchat Torah, we celebrate not only the story that is captured in the Torah but also, our role in that story. That is what makes Simchat Torah such an important holiday – it is a day that encapsulates the central question facing every Jew –-what is my role, what is my part, as a single letter in the scroll?
It was on Simchat Torah of this past year when we woke up to images of Israeli teenagers running in fields –when terrorists came into Israel to murder 1200 people, to burn down buildings and homes, to kidnap children and the elderly—it was on Simchat Torah when we woke up to footage of masked men running through streets with machine guns and rifles, when we saw cars on Israel’s roads laden with bullet holes, it was on Simchat Torah when we woke up to images of bodies scattered on the ground, women, children, lifeless bodies – it was on this annual day of celebration, this day in which we are told to dance in the streets with our Torah scrolls, with our story, this was the day when the worst atrocity for the Jewish people since the Shoah took place, when our story suddenly took a horrific turn.
Few of us felt like dancing on that Saturday morning. And in the days that followed, this feeling only seemed to get worse.
In the days after October 7th, we were met by silence from so many corners of our world – faculty and administration at our schools, colleagues, friends and co-workers at our places of work – so many around us acted as if nothing was different – as if the world was the very
th same as it had been on October 6 .
And then came the vicious attacks on Israel– days after the October 7th massacre, we began to hear chants in our streets about Zionism being evil, we heard language about Israel being the aggressor, about October 7th being a legitimate armed response, we started to hear students and faculty at our colleges question Israel’s very existence – calling Zionism racism and the Jewish state a white colonialist entity. In our subway, we witnessed protestors demanding to know who riding in the cars was a Zionist.
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Before October 7 , so many of us believed that we were living in a new
age – one in which our Judaism no longer kept us out of the non-Jewish world. We were accepted, our Judaism had even been embraced in popular culture – we never felt as though we needed to hide it, our non- Jewish friends loved coming to our Bar and Bat Mitzvah parties—some tried to hold their own Bar and Bat Mitzvah parties which made little sense to us, but it made us smile and feel good.
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Before October 7 , Jerry Seinfeld was loved by everyone—Jewish
cultural ideas and values were embraced by everyone—but after October
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7 , the world seemed suddenly dark—it continues to feel that way—
would any of us believe that in 2024 we would need billboards and commercials to tell the public to stop Jewish hate?
We have been here before.
Our own story includes countless examples of persecution, oppression, exile, and abandonment. From slavery in Egypt, to attacks by Amalek in the desert, from Babylonian exile to Roman exile, from the carnage of the Crusades to the expulsion from Spain, from the pogroms of Eastern Europe to the vicious destruction of the Shoah, we are a people well acquainted with maltreatment.
But is that the central theme of our story? Is the other title to our Torah – They Just Don’t Like Us.
You know, October 7th was not only a day in which Jews were kidnapped and murdered. It was also a day in which Jews acted like heroes.
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On October 7 , Noam Tibon, a retired Israeli general, a father and a
grandfather, woke up in his Tel Aviv home to a telephone call from his son Amir.
Amir, his wife Miri and their two daughters lived on Kibbutz Nahal Oz,
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right next to the Gaza border. On the morning of October 7 , Amir
heard mortar shells and immediately took his family into their safe room. As gun fire continued to erupt all around them, Amir learned from his work colleagues about the border infiltration. He called Noam, his father in Tel Aviv, and told him what was happening.
After hearing that their son and his family were in danger, Noam and his wife got in their car and drove south. With only a single pistol available, the couple came across a firefight between terrorists and Israeli soldiers. Noam joined the fire fight, eliminated the terrorists, and sent wounded soldiers along with his wife to drive towards the hospital.
Noam then went by foot to his son’s kibbutz and joined the defense forces there going house to house, seeking survivors – and then, ten hours after entering their saferoom, Amir’s daughter heard a voice and yelled out SABA is here!
Noam’s story is one of many in which individuals acted heroically on that day – standing up to terror, putting their lives at risk and saving lives.
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In the days after October 7 , there are so many examples of individuals
who continued to act like heroes—who not only saved lives, but also began to rebuild a whole world – people like David Gabai, the head of Kibbutz Re-im, who after October 7th helped to find two residential apartment buildings in Tel Aviv for hundreds of residents to move.
He and other leaders set up a school there and helped hundreds to rebuild their live. While in Israel last March, I visited David and saw the incredible work that he and his many partners are doing.
The stories of heroes are not just from Israel. In the aftermath of
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October 7 , community leaders, professors, Hillel directors, Federation
heads, rabbis, cantors, educators, students and so many others found ways to be there for others, to stand up for Israel, to comfort those in anguish and to ensure the Jewish people’s survival.
These heroes are not just reminders of momentary Jewish resilience – they are ongoing examples of a story that has long been told – a story of a people who have faced countless obstacles but have continued to survive—each Jew, one letter in a scroll.
This past March, I went to Israel to visit the sites of October 7th – to see what took place there on Simchat Torah of 2023.
I went to S’derot and met with a Rabbi who was preparing his synagogue for the day and ended up getting shot in the chest, I saw the destruction at the S’derot police station where a gunfight ensued between Hamas terrorists and police on duty, I went to the site of the Nova concert where I saw the makeshift memorial there for the hundreds of teens murdered while running away – and I went to Kibbutz Aza, where I met with Orit.
Orit grew up on the kibbutz—she spoke of her childhood as a blissful time of togetherness and family.
And then, as we walked alongside burned out houses whose walls were filled with bullet holes and broken windows, Orit began to tell us the stories.
A three-year old child walking with her father – her father shot to death in front of her – the child runs to neighbors’ houses and knocks on doors but no one answers because they are in their safe rooms.
Young adults who live in a special young adult section of the kibbutz celebrating a birthday party until 4am, going to bed only to be woken up two hours later to terrorists spreading bullet holes and throwing grenades into their homes. The young man who celebrated his birthday that night was one of the first to be killed.
The women of the kibbutz all speaking to one another over Whatsapp – one woman writing that the terrorists were right outside her home, and then inside her home and then they shot her husband, and she doesn’t know what to do and then—silence.
Orit’s ex-husband, the father of her children, going outside to check what was happening only to be shot to death. A makeshift surfboard memorial set up for him with the words. It is impossible to murder the soul.
As Orit told us these stories, she would pause because she simply still could not believe them, but she kept on taking us around and during it all, she was filled with this gratitude, this strange gratitude.
And then she took us to the border of the kibbutz where we looked out to Gaza – where we saw the place from which the terrorists came – and as she looked at us, she said, “I can’t believe you came. You have wives, you have jobs, you have families, I can’t believe you came.”
As we got back on the bus, we told our tour guide that we were glad to bear witness to what happened. He looked back at us, paused and said,
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“You are not witnesses to October 7 , a witness is someone who
passively looks on – you are not witnesses, you are each participants…”
This is what gave Orit such immense gratitude in our visit – we were there as Jews, we did not go to Israel and to the October 7th sites simply to witness atrocities – we came there as active participants in an ongoing story – we came there because these atrocities happened not just to Orit or just the people at Kibbutz Aza, or Kibbutz Be’eri, or Kibbutz Re’eim, or in S’derot – these atrocities happened to all of us – and now—each of us as single letters in that scroll, we must respond collectively…
I often think back about that trip that Shara and I took to Russia in 2002 and specifically, those nine incredible women we worked with who were just rediscovering their Judaism – and were so dedicated to rebuilding a Jewish world in Russia, they were so dedicated to taking on their own roles as Jewish leaders – I realized that the story of Soviet Jews is not oppression and persecution—it is that same Jewish story that we keep hearing again and again, the story of a people who understand their role in their own story—
And so too, October 7th was not simply a day all about Jewish death and destruction – it was a day that also revealed the power of Jewish solidarity and responsibility –
To be Jewish means that you are a part of something that is bigger than you – a people, to be Jewish means you are a letter in that scroll.
October 7th took place on Simchat Torah – a day all about Jewish responsibility and resilience, a day celebrated by Soviet Jews as a way of protesting their treatment and fighting for their freedom, a day in which Israelis not only died but also fought back and survived and healed and continued to live,
Simchat torah is a day which epitomizes Jewish resilience…a day which reflects the main theme of the Jewish story – despite the horrors, despite the tragedies, despite the chaos, we live on – AM YISRAEL CHAI
Shanah Tovah